The big snow storm came rushing up from the south, it hit Toronto hard, and for a while it made getting around much of the city difficult and dangerous.
To make it easier for those who couldn't stay at home, the police sent out this message:
For there was Boss Ford, standing in the snow, looking ridiculous.
Using a tiny toy shovel to shovel snow BACKWARDS.
And driving down the highway playing Captain Snowmageddon.#BREAKING - Premier Ford is helping dig out stranded motorist across Toronto as seen in this video. pic.twitter.com/lXQ064BRoS
— Richard Southern (@RichardCityNews) January 17, 2022
Ontario Premier Doug Ford is out and about in today's blizzard rescuing people stuck on Toronto-area highways - 📹 Eddy Kandic (@bloodey99) #Toronto #Ontario #DougFord #ONpoli #ONstorm #snowTO pic.twitter.com/Yb8tZ5sQhv
— blogTO (@blogTO) January 17, 2022
While the media played along under the watchful eye of Ford's media director, Ivana Yelich...
So the whole thing was a farce, and many people were NOT impressed.
But then distracted driving seems to run in the Ford family.
And Doug has other things to worry about, namely his tanking polls.
New data from the non-profit Angus Reid Institute finds Ontario Premier Doug Ford down six more points in approval amid frustration in Ontario over his handling of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Fewer than one-in-three (30%) Ontarians approve of him, marking a new low for his tenure at Queen’s Park.
For if that poll isn't great, neither is this one:
OMG. I'd heard but I hadn't seen the videos. In the first video we have Doug doing what Doug does best. Nothing. He's shoveling as he governs, no direction, all over the place and on a health note he's huffing and puffing like he should be on a ventilator. In the preceding picture he's holding the tow strap with a clueless look as to what it is. It's quite funny actually but also very educational. We get to see Doug as he would perform at his "regular" job. Ill prepared, scattershot, clueless and breaking the law. If anyone thinks this will be good for Dougy's image then I've got some land for sale at Mar-a-Lardo if you'd like?
ReplyDeleteThanks for this post, Simon. I pride myself on being prepared for whatever I do with the intent of doing it well. Seeing the Doug-tastrophe in action was hilarious and really explains a lot. It's not Doug's fault. He's just plain old stupid.
JD
Bell Media deleted a rant by morning host Sid Seixeiro calling out the MSM for fluffing Boss Ford with a free PR campaign. They only reposted it because they could no longer ignore the onslaught of rage coming from social media.
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/vote4robgill/status/1483451385928732680
Man, they really do hate that #CdnMediaFailed hashtag. They can't keep calling everyone who posts it a TruAnon forever. Not when some of the people posting it aren't even all that fond of Trudeau but despise the likes of Ford and every corrupt Con in the country. Someone please follow the money and find out where CTV's owners' donations are going to. I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of entries for the PCs. Next time Bell Let's Talk Day comes around and they do their phony song and dance about mental health, they need to be reminded of Unca Dougie's maltreatment of the families of children suffering from autism.
Remember when DoFo and his idiot brudda had their own "channel" to bypass the "biased liberal media"? Seems they successfully bullied the Queen's Park press gallery into submission. Access journalism is an absolute menace to society. Shame on Dhanraj, DeMello, Richard Southern et. al. for behaving like Fox News with Trump or even worse, propagandists for North Korea.
BTW, Simon: Wish I'd known you were going to write about what Dougie was really shoveling. I did this mockup of an old Maclean's cover awhile back, and it would have fit perfectly in your post. Maybe you could tweet it? I call it... "Snow Job"! ⛄️
https://i.postimg.cc/rmztbJYb/doug-ford-corruption-macleans-parody.png
Shame shame shame on CONservative pollster Nik Nanos publishing "new" numbers this morning to put the spin out that the CONservatives are now ahead of the Liberals and the NDP only 4 points back.
ReplyDeleteCanadian Polling on Twitter has the real numbers with the Liberals still in the lead.
https://twitter.com/CanadianPolling/status/1483524317266722823?s=20
#IStandWithTrudeau #CdnMediaFailed #NeverVoteNDP #NeverVoteConservative #AlwaysVoteLiberal
Yes it was an obvious photo op stunt. But for everyone losing their head over Ford helping drivers today and having a camera handy to record it: he’s a politician. That’s what politicians do. All of them. And yes, that includes the politicians you like, too.
ReplyDeleteHi Jackie, great links. Sid eviscerates Doug and shames his peers who enable Ugh Ford. Beautiful and oh so overdue. I think I'll join Twitter just so I can help keep the #CdnMediaFailed hashtag going and to help drive those Con hacks insane:)
ReplyDeleteJD
Anon 5:41 (and I think I know who you are because I saw that comment already on Twitter) -- uh, no. Obviously all politicians do photo-ops, that's not the problem. The problem is the blatant double standard that the sycophantic media applies to cons versus those of small- or especially big-L Liberal politicians. The free PR given to cons by those same embedded media acolytes who "just happened to have a camera ready". And how indignant they get, and how they circle the wagons when their perfidy is called out.
ReplyDeleteDo you honestly think that if Trudeau went and shoveled people out in the snowstorm the media wouldn't be howling with outrage about how he needs to get back to work? What amnesia you must have about how Trudeau was eviscerated for laying a teddy bear at an Indigenous child's grave at Cowessess, while Scott Moe was lauded for doing literally the same thing! Why did Trudeau face calls to resign over harmless yearbook photos when Scott Moe killed someone with his car and is still there? For that matter, why isn't Ford facing any criticism or sanctions for driving so as to endanger by having a Zoom call while driving his truck on icy roads???
What amnesia you must have about how Trudeau was lambasted for helping out with sandbags during a flood in Ontario in 2019. But crickets or "he's speaking the common language of the people's frustration" when Doug gets "folksy" and threatens to hop in an ice cream truck to stick dynamite up the Pfizer CEO's "Kalamazoo wazoo yin-yang," to cover for his abject failures of COVID management at the provincial level. Everything under the sun, and in the Toronto Sun, is Trudeau bad and Trudeau's fault.
It's "cute" when O'Toole makes political props of his son in his (or Jeff's) lame videos. If Trudeau did the same thing, he'd face a bevy of investigations and op-eds demanding he resign for child abuse. Whoever made the video would be hauled before the ethics committee and probably driven out of business. Or do you not remember the sneering over the family's annual trick-or-treat outings? If Doug went out dressed like a cheesecake, the Queen's Park Press Gallery would ooh and ahh over his fashion sense.
If Katie Telford was sleeping with Aaron Wherry like Ivana Yelich is boinking Brian Lilley, damn sure we'd never hear the end of it. At least Scott Gilmore disclosed his marriage to Catherine McKenna. Coyne, of course, is subject to no such obligations when reporting on his "cousin". And yet they go balls to the wall every time Trudeau so much as breathes in the direction of someone he "might" have had a passing encounter with at any point in his life, and run to the ethics commissioner crying CORRUPTION! just to bring down his polling numbers. Now do Skippy and Mrs. Pigeon and the lingering "questions" about their alleged "arrangement" with Cooper.
Please do inform us further why it's acceptable to hound Margaret or Sophie Trudeau while Krista Ford or Ben Harper are off-limits. Ben works for Kenney while daddy is "consulting" with the UCP. Why the hell isn't he on the sunshine list? Do you really think there would be such silence if Xavier or Ella-Grace were hired for the parliamentary page program? Or if they were on social media promoting anti-vax quackery?
In the states we call the media's affliction the IOKIYAR bias, or It's OK If You're a Republican. I suppose in Canada the acronym still fits, in the form of It's OK If You're a Reform-a-Tory. We are sick and fucking tired of the blatantly obvious double standard from the "lying, loser, corrupt fake news media." That's why we're upset. Why don't you wake up and smell what you're shoveling.
BTW, the PM dragged his official photographer to the grave while Moe's pics were press pics.
DeleteAs for everything being "Trudeau's fault "...spare me. You're still screaming "fake scandal" every time he's embroiled in controversy and blaming everything on Harper, the Premiers, Layton, and some guy who died 100 years ago.
Anon 5:29 -- I saw that poll this morning, and it made me have a WTF moment too. But on closer inspection, I wouldn't be too worried about Nanos' malaka malarkey, as his is a telephone poll that swings all over the place, and even that poll in and of itself showed shifts within the MoE and the cons ahead by an irrelevant decimal. It also had Trudeau remaining in the lead as preferred PM, with O'Toole and Singh competitive with "I don't know". Not a good place for them to be.
ReplyDeleteNanos is not the gold standard it used to be, even though people treat it that way. Eric Grenier discussed this on his podcast during the election, when the IVR/phone polls differed wildly from the online panels that ended up being more accurate. Evan Scrimshaw had a running commentary that was similar. One poll is not a definitive conclusion.
O'Toole is going nowhere and neither is the NDP. Literally nothing has happened to cause wild shifts in the electorate. Frank Graves even said that people are burned out from politics right now and hardly bothering to answer polls. Besides, in an actual election, the NDP vote tends to deflate barring an ahistoric Liberal collapse. 2011 was an anomaly that's extremely unlikely to ever happen again.
Popular vote is irrelevant and seat models are iffy. Fact of the matter is the Liberals are still ahead. Abacus' latest shows a more realistic picture and also indicates the Liberals are the only ones who haven't seen their accessible pool shrinking since the election.
https://twitter.com/DavidColetto/status/1482066897499836423
No election for a long time anyway. Cons are trapped between keeping O'Toole as a lame duck ad nauseam or permanently putting themselves out of their own misery with Poilievre. Never get complacent but now is not the time to panic. Trudeau is fine. Nanos can pack it in.
***
Anon 8:02 -- I'm not even going to bother dignifying your blinders with a response. You failed to engage with anything else in that argument and only trumpeted Con talking points. But as for "blaming some guy who died 100 years ago" -- uh, maybe Alberta cons should examine why they're still steeped in abject hatred for a PM who has done far more for them than even daddy Harper, because they can't get over their hatred of Trudeau the elder who died 20 years ago and left office in the '80s? No reason not to fault Harper when the damage he's done is still fresh and he still looms large over his abject cancer of a party. That legacy includes the creation of Postmedia, which has been responsible for hatching so many of the (yes) fake Trudeau scandals and is nothing but an admitted PR front for cons.
Back to Jeff's war room with you. 0/10 would not respond again.
As we enter 2022 I am so grateful to have the Liberals in power instead of the party who got Canada involved in Afghanistan under Harper and who would get us involved in more wars, and the NDP who backed Harper's war in the HOC relegated to 4th party status.
DeleteHaha lol. Ooops. Grifters in glass houses. Perfect example of media bias right here and why an "influencer" doesn't make for a worthwhile "party leader". We're going to get wall-to-wall coverage and endless rounds of committee inquisitions on this, right? Where's Charlie?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/jagmeet-singh-chair-gift-reimburse-1.6319704
On the contrary, I'm sure it'll be forgotten by the weekend. See, because it's a "mistake" when it's the "conscience of parliament" but it's a "massive corruption scandal" when it's a Liberal named Trudeau.
Anyone who doesn't see the obvious double standard is lying or willfully obtuse.
Hi JD….I’ve heard that after performing for the cameras the Fordzilla quickly dropped his tiny toy shovel and retreated to his truck. Which is just as well, because the way he was shoveling snow backwards, and puffing like a steam engine, I was afraid he’d have a heart attack. I should have run another photo that had one of Ford’s stooges unwrapping one of those toy shovels, which it only too clear what we were watching was a crude photo-op. But as I said in my post, I doubt it will do him much good. He has done too much damage to Ontario, and caused too many deaths, for most people to ever forgive him. But is instead a really good example of why Canadians should never vote for the Cons….
ReplyDeleteHi Jackie….As I’ve said before, CTV wants to elect the Cons,so they can kill the CBC, and they can get its advertising money. And Bell Media now owns so many news outlets it’s the broadcasting equivalent of Postmedia. I certainly do remember when the Ford brothers got their own TV program, and what a disaster it was. If I recall they had to spend about five hours, producing one hour of trash talk, and was pulled from the Sun News Network after only one episode. The redneck brothers then took their Ford Nation to YouTube, but even the National Post described them as “a bizarro world version of Wayne’s World.” But only lasted until Rob Ford was forced to enter rehab to try to cure his crack habit. I will never understand how the Ford brothers managed to fool so many people, but I’m pretty sure most of them are sorry now….
ReplyDeleteHi anon@5:29PM….Nik Nanos is such an obvious Con I stopped taking his polka seriously a long time ago. But as you point out, even he can’t conceal that the Cons are tanking, and that Justin Trudeau is the country’s preferred Prime Minister….
ReplyDeleteHi anon@8:02 PM….It’s true that all politicians organize photo-ops, but not in the middle of a serious snowstorm, and in the middle of a pandemic. Only Cons do that, and it was disgusting. They have no moral compass, and truly don’t know what they are doing…
ReplyDeleteHi Jackie@7:17/PM….excellent comment. The Cons are now so desperate, they know not what they are doing or saying. They are trying to swarm this blog, but I delete most of their comments on arrival. The only reason I leave some up is so people can see how brain damaged they are, and so you can demolish them….😉
ReplyDeleteHi Jackie @9:35 PM…..It seems that Jagmeet really does think he is the King of Khalistan, with a throne like rocking chair to go with his fancy suits, his exoensive designer bikes, and his even more expensive BMW. The NDP made a huge mistake by appointing him leader. He really should be a Con, because the last thing we need is a loser who thinks he is a winner. What an absolute farce…
ReplyDeleteATTENTION CON TROLLS:
ReplyDeleteI know you are desperate, but I need to make it clear that I’m not the least bit interested in reading your pathetic comments. So any comments you send to this blog will be deleted on arrival. Sorry, not sorry. 🥳